Table Of ContentJOYCE’S ULYSSES
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JOYCE’S ULYSSES
A READER’S GUIDE
SEAN SHEEHAN
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Sean Sheehan 2009
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Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
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ISBN: 978-1-8470-6518-6 (hardback)
978-1-8470-6519-3 (paperback)
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CONTENTS
1. Contexts 1
2. Language, Style and Form 10
3. Reading Ulysses 23
4. Critical Reception and Publishing History 87
5. Adaptation, Interpretation and Influence 101
6. Guide to Further Reading 114
Notes 127
Index 131
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CHAPTER 1
CONTEXTS
James Joyce was born in 1882 into a middle-class Catholic Dublin
family and the course of his childhood charts the family’s gradual
impoverishment. His father, John Stanislaus, owned property in Cork
and there were servants in their Dublin home. As the final decade of
the nineteenth century approached, the family moved to a new home
in Bray, a suburb to the south of Dublin, and the young James was
sent to the prestigious Clongowes Wood College as a boarder. Family
financial problems, brought on by the father’s drinking and loss of
his job, soon affected James and he had to leave the school just as
his family had to leave their comfortable Bray existence and move to
the north side of the city. After a brief spell attending a Christian
Brothers’ school, John Joyce was able to get his son a free place at
Belvedere College, a highly regarded Jesuit day school in Dublin, and
it was here that Joyce first read Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of
Ulysses. Academically precocious, Joyce became a student at Univer-
sity College Dublin where he read widely and deeply and became
familiar with European writers who were not on any of his reading
lists. All this time his family was falling deeper into poverty. Early in
1902 he graduated with a degree in Modern Languages, a month
after the death of his 14-year-old brother from typhoid fever. Joyce
sang his favourite lyric, Yeats’s ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’, at his
brother’s bedside.
The downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish
Parliamentary Party at Westminster and champion of the Home
Rule Movement, parallels the fall from prosperity for the Joyce
family and provides the political landscape in which James grew up.
Parnell joined forces with Gladstone’s Liberal Party in return for
Home Rule for Ireland. Then, at the end of the 1880s, Parnell was
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JOYCE’S ULYSSES
cited in divorce proceedings and his affair with the married Kitty
O’Shea became public knowledge. The Irish Catholic Church and
Gladstone denounced him, the Irish party was split and Parnell lost
his position of influence. Parnell’s fall was a bitter disappointment to
his supporters, of whom John Joyce was one, and Irish hopes for
some form of limited independence from Britain grew moribund.
An age of political activism was over as the Irish Nationalist Party
fragmented and a right-wing hegemony of church and state emerged
to dominate Catholic Ireland. The Catholic Church in Ireland sought
to contain the force of secular nationalism and was happy to collude
with a British presence so long as the occupier continued to acknowl-
edge the right of the Church to its share in the governance of the
colony.
REJECTING THE IRISH REVIVAL
Political dissent shifted to a cultural front and what became known
as the Irish Revival exerted a growing importance in the early decades
of Joyce’s life. Reconstructing the forgotten art of ballads, epics and
national myths became an artistic and ideological project designed to
forge a new national consciousness and members of the Anglo-Irish
elite were united in their resolve to build a syncretic, intensified form
of nationalist sentiment that would fuse Anglo-Irish Ireland with
Irish Ireland. The Revival looked back to a mythical, pre-Christian
Ireland for sources of a national identity, from athletic games to
language and literature. The Irish Literary Revival, dominated by
Anglo-Irish, Protestants figures, attracted Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady
Gregory, George Moore and George Russell (also known as AE). It
sought to be non-sectarian but the wish to bring together the best of
Anglo-Irish culture with native Gaelic forms was blind to political
bloodlines. The existence of the Anglo-Irish depended on a class-
based, colonial order, the result of invasion and imposition, and not
everyone was unaware of this.
Joyce rejected the Irish Literary Revival and the cultural national-
ism of Yeats which sought to graft an ideological layer onto forms
of the Irish literary tradition buried in Gaelic myth and folklore.
Colonialist stereotypes, argued revivalists, would be traduced by
fresh images of Irish art intimating a collectivist spirit of community.
Joyce could not identify with the kind of nationalism that the Revival
espoused although he could respect its ideal of creating a literature
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CONTEXTS
that would be Irish and modern. What he rejected was the middle-
class politics of the literati and the morality of a religion that had
condemned Parnell. For Joyce the Revival shared the hypocrisy of
Irish Catholicism when it came to matters sexual and he distrusted
the class allegiances of Anglo-Irish figures as much as he suspected
their aesthetics. His model of national expression was Ibsen and in
his early critical writings Joyce laments the failure of Irish writers to
challenge the tradition in which they have been placed while at the
same time ridiculing Anglo-Irish revivalists.
MEETING PEOPLE
Joyce had registered to study medicine in Dublin after graduating but
he left Ireland in late 1902 for Paris where the Faculté de Médecine
offered him a place. He returned sooner than expected when his
mother became seriously ill in April 1903. The telegram that arrived
from his father read: ‘Nother [sic] dying, come home father.’ She died
in August, after pleading unsuccessfully with her eldest son to return
to Catholicism, and Joyce was still in Ireland the following year when,
on 16 June 1904, he first walked out with Nora Barnacle, a young
woman he had met on Nassau Street in Dublin. She was 20, came
from Galway in the west of Ireland and was feisty enough to have left
home after her uncle beat her for consorting with a young Protestant
man. Uneducated, having left school at the age of 12, she found
employment in a Dublin hotel as a chambermaid. She won the heart
of the would-be writer who wrote to her of his profound dissatisfac-
tion with Ireland – ‘There is no life here – no naturalness or honesty.
People live together in the same houses all their lives and at the end
they are as far apart as ever’1 and in October 1904 they left for the
continent where Joyce had got a job teaching English. Emigration
was nothing new for the Irish: saints and scholars had been travers-
ing Europe since the end of the Roman Empire, joined by political
exiles from the sixteenth century onwards, and Joyce saw himself as
part of an honourable tradition. A number of militant nationalists,
the Fenians, had fled to Paris over the years, including a Joseph Casey
whom the young Joyce met there through his father’s connections.
Named Egan in chapter three of Ulysses – the fictional Stephen
Dedalus has spent time with him – Casey is remembered with
affection (see page 32). Someone else whom Joyce remembered,
though not with affection, was Oliver St John Gogarty, a wealthy and
3
